Number three is a baseline. This to me is where a project can become a failed project or a successful project, because in the beginning of the project it’s important to once the plan is approved by the Change Control Board is to baseline it. So you’re, in essence, approving the plan, the project plan, which also includes the project schedule. What happens is during the project, of course, changes are always going to occur, changes to the time, the scope, the budget, and the quality. As long as you take those changes to a CCB, which we’ll talk about later, to get approved, then they’re giving you approval to re-baseline the project, and that’s approval to make changes. If your schedule is elongated, maybe it’s delayed for some time, if you get the appropriate approval and re-baseline, to me that again is the difference between a failed or successful project, so very important.
The other is a triple constraint. The little twist about a triple constraint is there are four components of the triple constraint. It’s usually indicated by a triangle. So it’s balancing the time, the cost, the scope, and the quality of your project. So, with the triple constraint, these things occur, specifically around changes. The time, if you increase the time, it might and will impact at least one of these other components. It’s always managing these things so you keep your project on track. These things are the things that you look at when you take things to the CCB, your Change Control Board.
Number five is a project life cycle. There are many different types of project life cycles. This is a single phase life cycle. This is the one indicated by PMI, the Project Management Institute. Again, it’s a single phase. They are initiating processes that occur, that feed the planning processes and at the same time. Once your project begins executing, the executing processes, monitoring and controlling processes begin to occur throughout the project. Once the project is completed, you hit your closing processes. That is a project life cycle: initiating, planning, monitoring, controlling, executing. and closing the project.
Number six is a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a tool. It’s a graphical display of the schedule information. If you look at your work breakdown structure, in your tool that you use, you can look at your work breakdown structure. It includes dates and durations for tasks to be completed or deliverables to be produced.
Then the CCB. When I came on board as a project manager, I kept hearing about a CCB. I thought, what is a CCB? It stands for the Change Control Board. The Change Control Board is a group of stakeholders. It’s not all of the stakeholders. It’s representatives from the stakeholder groups. They are on your board. They’re the people who are designated in your project plan, who are the people with the authority to make approval or denials for things. They review changes. They evaluate them. They approve them. They delay them or reject changes on your project. These are the people with the authority. What I love about this is it takes the pressure off of project managers. I see many times where project managers try to take upon themselves to make these decisions. It’s not for the project manager to make. It’s for the project manager to have the processes in place, get the processes in place for the changes to be fed to the Change Control Board and really facilitate that process. Again, it’s the CCB’s responsibility for making those decisions.
Then the stakeholders, again. So who is a stakeholder? The stakeholders include people or organizations. It could be your customers. It could be your clients. It could be your vendor partners. It could be different organizations, and they’re actively involved. It’s important that they’re actively involved and they interact and may be positive or negatively affected by the execution of the project. They have a vested interest. These people who are deemed the stakeholders, again, they’re engaged in something that’s being done on the project. It’s usually to assist them with something that they need, and they certainly don’t want any negative impacts.
The other one is change management. Many times there is confusion on managing change and change management. They sound similar, but change management is about . . . it’s a project management plan, so it includes the processes on who does what, when, and where related to the changes on the projects. This project management plan is to control the scope versus managing change. It’s typically associated with managing change of a project. A project is initiated or executed, and it’s going to infiltrate different organizations or groups of the corporation, and that change is going to have some trigger emotional behaviors of the company. There are many organizations that focus on managing the change, and they come in and help the organizations do the communications, the planning for the people so that it doesn’t cause mass chaos w